This first exhibition in Portugal of influential New York-based British artist Liam Gillick (1964, Aylesbury, UK) results from a series of site visits to the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art made since 2013. The subsequent exhibition takes the form of a year-long presentation that reflects Gillick’s long-standing engagement with questions of process, participation, collectivity and decision-making, and of which his varied approach to language and the language of space are an expression.

Campaign has been conceived as a series of changing sculptural interventions in the large, central gallery of the museum along with other spaces over the course of the year. Gillick presents a progressive overlaying of spatial and performative situations that elaborate previously realized and unrealized sculptural projects dating from the late 1990s to the present. Including sound, sculptural and text-based works that have existed as early prototypes or sketches but never produced on the architectural scale for which they were initially intended, Gillick’s choreography of spaces, objects and ideas poetically addresses themes of time, as history and duration, and the visual and spatial codes of the social.

Factories in the Snow, comprising piano, sound and artificial snow, and conceived by Gillick for ‘Postman’s Time’, curated by Philippe Parreno and Hans Ulrich Obrist for the first Manchester International Festival in 2007, serves as an overture to the exhibition. This is followed by the presentation in the same space of a 1:1 scaled version of AC/DC Joy Division House, a reflection of Gillick’s first public commission for a social centre for teenagers in Milan. Both piano and speculative architecture merge into transparent framework for text and sound while a large-scale sculptural translation of Guy Debord’s A Game of War occupies the Museum’s glass-walled sculpture gallery over the summer. In the autumn, the exhibition culminates in a series of interventions into the Museum’s architectural framework using the language of the discussion platform.

Within the architectural and programming context of Serralves, Gillick’s exhibition as intervention will contribute to the Museum’s aim of articulating new models for exhibition making that respond to the distinctive practices of artists in their sculptural, discursive and temporal dimensions.

‘Campaign’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, assisted by exhibition curator Filipa Loureiro.

About the artist:

Liam Gillick lives and works in New York. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Recent one-person exhibitions include ‘All-Imitate Act’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); ‘From 199C to 199D’, Magasin – Centre national d’art contemporain, Grenoble, France (2014); ‘From 199A to 199B: Liam Gillick’, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York (2012); ‘A Game of War Structure’, IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2011). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Adventures of the black square: Abstract art and society 1915–2015’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); ‘Une Histoire: Art, Architecture, Design des anées 1980 à nos jours’, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); ‘The Decade 1984–1999’, Centre Pompidou Metz, Metz, France (2014); ‘9 artists’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2013); ‘One foot in the real world’, IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2013); ‘Reading List: Artist’s Selections from the MoMA Library Collection, New York (2013). Gillick participated in the 2015 Istanbul Biennial and Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. In 2009, he represented Germany in the Venice Biennial. The artist was awarded the Paul Cassirer Kunstpreis, Berlin in 1998, was nominated for the Turner Prize, Tate, London in 2002 and the Vincent Award at the Stedelijk Museum in 2009. He is the author of a number of books including a volume of his selected critical writing. High profile public works include the British Government Home Office (Interior Ministry) building in London and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt. Throughout this time Gillick has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative projects with artists including Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner and Louise Lawler.

What do the punk band Black Flag and the unfinished Rosseau manuscript “Rêveries” have in common? Both negotiate space, confronting society to claim it, in one case, or retreating to seek it in nature as a form of self-knowledge. The exhibition of Vasco Barata in Sismógrafo, in Porto, entitled “Wild sea money”, tries to inscribe itself in this unstable movement between a withdrawal to a place (an image?) idealized in “nature”, where theoretical and social experimentation may be an option, and the possibility of creating or claiming in the “free”, space considered of less symbolic and economic value. The constant contradiction between the possibility of escape to an imagined nature and the environment where we are inscribed is the motto of this exhibition. The image as the primordial axis of work, the quotes of pop culture, the work of editing and the detail of the small objects, remain some of the authoral traits of Vasco Barata in this exhibition that presents unpublished works. James Joyce, “Ulysses. Episode Three: Proteus”

VASCO BARATA (b.1974, Lisbon, Portugal) lives and works in Lisbon. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon, with parallel studies in Photography and a post graduation in Drawing, by the same University. In 2006 he attended the Visual Arts Course of the Gulbenkian Program Creativity and Artistic Creation (Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian / Ar.Co). He currently attends a PhD in Contemporary Art at the College of the Arts – University of Coimbra. Since the late 1990s, Vasco Barata has been presenting his work in a variety of ways, alternating mainly between careful research in the field of construction and image perception (through the use of photography and video) and an attempt to understand the expression mechanisms related to the daily practice of drawing. He articulates, in his works, a particular interest in cinema and cinematographic strategies, in the codes of language and in a wide range of references of popular culture. From his most recent exhibitions, the following stand out: “Spooky Action at a Distance”, Fonseca Macedo Contemporary Art (Ponta Delgada, Azores, 2016); “Um peso fantasma”, curated by Albano da Silva Pereira, CAV – Centro de Artes Visuais (Coimbra, 2014) and “Les Apaches”, Appleton Square (Lisbon, 2013).